Missing Data Imputation for Supervised Learning

Missing data imputation can help improve the performance of prediction models in situations where missing data hide useful information. This paper compares methods for imputing missing categorical data for supervised classification tasks. We experiment on two machine learning benchmark datasets with...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jason Poulos, Rafael Valle
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2018-04-01
Series:Applied Artificial Intelligence
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08839514.2018.1448143
Description
Summary:Missing data imputation can help improve the performance of prediction models in situations where missing data hide useful information. This paper compares methods for imputing missing categorical data for supervised classification tasks. We experiment on two machine learning benchmark datasets with missing categorical data, comparing classifiers trained on non-imputed (i.e., one-hot encoded) or imputed data with different levels of additional missing-data perturbation. We show imputation methods can increase predictive accuracy in the presence of missing-data perturbation, which can actually improve prediction accuracy by regularizing the classifier. We achieve results comparable to the state-of-the-art on the Adult dataset with missing-data perturbation and $$k$$-nearest-neighbors ($$k$$-NN) imputation.
ISSN:0883-9514
1087-6545